China Is Not an Expansionist Power
Evidence past and present shows China has long been inward-looking
“We should stop copying the Soviet Union.”
— Mao told the CCP Central Secretariat in 1956, before the Sino-Soviet Split
The key mistake commentators on China make is equating it with the Soviet Union. It’s misguided not only in China’s domestic policy, but in its foreign policy. Unlike Chinese domestic policy, where the U.S. and other countries have little influence, fundamentally misjudging Chinese foreign policy may invite great tragedies internationally.
The core difference between China and the U.S.S.R. in foreign policy is the former’s non-expansionism, which is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture and history. To careful observers, the evidence abounds.
The Sinocentric Foundation of the Classical Chinese State
A continental civilization, China largely reached its natural geographic limits with unification under the centralized Qin dynasty in 221 BCE. Bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the east and south, the Eurasian Steppe to the north, and the Tibetan and Yungui Plateaus to the west, China under the Han dynasty (202 BCE to 220 CE) adopted the pre-Qin Sinocentric worldview that the Chinese sovereign was the Son of Heaven, superior to all barbaric rulers outside China proper. Pre-modern Chinese national security thinking was preoccupied with internal stability and nomadic invaders. Instead of conquest or client control, China managed foreign relations via a tributary system entailing mere acknowledgment of the central position of the Chinese emperor in exchange for titles and gifts. Foreign rulers in the system were left to their own devices in foreign and domestic policy. From the Sinocentric perspective, dominating the world simply means dominating China.
What about Xinjiang and Tibet?
When Tibet and the tribes in Xinjiang were part of the tributary system under the Ming dynasty (1368 CE to 1644 CE), the final ethnic Chinese dynasty, China in keeping with precedents refrained from interference in their affairs. It all changed with the Manchu conquest of China from 1618 CE to 1683 CE. The only non-Chinese dynasty to rule China besides the Mongols, the Qing was the sole non-Mongol dynasty based in China to permanently annex Xinjiang and Tibet, after vanquishing their Mongol overlords in 1758 CE. Although the Manchu-led Qing monarchy lost its native language before its fall, they never identified as ethnic Chinese and departed from Chinese customs in major areas.
Is Modern China Different?
The tributary system was shattered by the Qing’s humiliating defeats in the Opium Wars (1839 CE to 1860 CE). At long last, China was forced to treat other countries as equals and clearly demarcate its borders. At the same time, Chinese national security thinking shifted overnight to the defense of its preexisting territory from foreign imperialism, chiefly Tsarist Russia and Imperial Japan. Historically fuzzy borders aside, especially between India and Qing Tibet and Xinjiang, China has made no new territorial claims on the Asian mainland or created a client state since the Opium Wars. On the contrary, the People’s Republic of China has always claimed a smaller territory than either the Qing or the Republic of China.
The Novelty of Maritime Disputes
Chinese claims on the Spratly, Paracel and Senkaku Islands are frequently cited as evidence of expansionism. Such a view overlooks the ambiguity of historical sovereignty over uninhabited rocks and the lack of traditional international law in the East and South China Seas. North Vietnam once accepted China’s claims before reneging, while the Philippines did not contest them until decades after the claims were announced in 1948.
Whatever the claims, since ratifying UNCLOS in 1996, China has not blocked trade flows in the South China Sea or used deadly force to challenge the other claimants’ effective control.
The Extreme Non-Interventionism of Contemporary Chinese Foreign Policy
Chinese non-expansionism has endured since the communist takeover in 1949. Even Mao, a fervent believer in worldwide revolution who harshly denounced Khrushchev for proposing peaceful coexistence with capitalism, only pushed for one major intervention, the Chinese entry into the Korean War. According to leading Korean War expert Shen Zhihua’s research, after U.S. forces crossed into North Korea, Mao was almost alone in the politburo in insisting on sending Chinese troops. Yet, China has never tried to turn North Korea into a satellite.
Upon his death in 1976, the CCP leadership was nearly unanimous in jettisoning Mao’s radicalism. In foreign affairs, it has adopted extreme non-interventionism.
· China has only one treaty ally, North Korea, a Maoist legacy.
· China has no client state.
· China has only one military base abroad, in the Horn of Africa.
· The Chinese air force has never seen action since the Korean War, when it was utterly primitive. It was held back to limit the brief border conflicts with India and Vietnam.
· China promises no first use of nuclear weapons, the only member on the U.N. Security Council to do so.
· China under the CCP never attempted to reconquer Mongolia, formerly part of the Qing and the Republic of China.
· China never attempted to invade Portuguese Macau, when Portugal was unable to mount a defense.
· China has refused to supply Russia with weapons and criticized Putin’s nuclear threats in the grinding war with Ukraine.
· The question of Taiwan poses real risks, but in opposing separatism China prioritizes appearances over substances. (The Taiwan question is complex and explored in depth on this blog here.)
Could one imagine how unstable the world would be if China emulated the foreign adventurism of Russia or Iran?
A Call for a Broader Perspective on History and Culture
Well-trained in Thucydides and nostalgic for the Concert of Europe, international relations thinkers in America are trying to apply the lessons to the rejuvenated superpower in the East. However, a balance of power framework developed based on classical Greek and modern European history is ill-suited for East Asia; far too many struggle to comprehend historical and cultural knowledge considered rudimentary in China and its neighbors. During the Cold War, Russia experts in the West were fluent in Russian history and culture. How many “China experts” today could claim the same?
As Henry Kissinger noted in 2005, “[t]he Chinese state in its present dimensions has existed substantially for 2,000 years. The Russian empire was governed by force; the Chinese empire by cultural conformity”. A purely realist analysis of China’s rise neglects its ancient Confucian foundation, in many ways the polar opposite of erstwhile Russian or Japanese expansionism. Such unique traditions profoundly shape its grand strategies still to this day.
Ma ZiXuan- I appreciate you contributing your thoughts. However, I believe your thesis is based on a selective reading of the facts and the history. China has a long territorial expansion which is how it came to be larger than the Roman Empire. It subjugated non-Han peoples in Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjian, Mongolia, and other western provinces. It also subjugated various tributary vassals in the premodern period. But its success also bred its weakness as size is difficult to manage (even with that Hanzi written language). And so, it has struggled to be cohesive. From roughly 1600 to 2000, China was economically marginal, politically fractured, and frequently unable to govern its own periphery — making non-expansion a condition of weakness, not cultural disposition. The "hide your light" doctrine of Deng explicitly prescribed acknowledges this: restraint was tactical, not principled. China today retains colonial-era conquests — Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia — where it violently suppresses indigenous majorities through mass detention, cultural erasure, and demographic displacement. Nothing in the Chinese nature prevented this nor has it constrained China in the CCP era. Weakness, not character, determines behavior.
Tibet (1950): Military invasion, annexation, and suppression of the 1959 uprising; the Dalai Lama government driven into exile; ongoing cultural and religious destruction
Xinjiang: 1–1.8 million Uyghurs detained without trial; forced sterilization campaigns; destruction of mosques and cemeteries; UN characterization of potential crimes against humanity
South China Sea (2013–2016): Dash 6 line in conflict with maritime law and asserting dominion over areas never controlled by ancient or modern China. Construction of seven artificial islands with military installations; 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling rejected; ongoing coercion of Philippine, Vietnamese, and Malaysian vessels
Hong Kong (2020): National Security Law imposed 27 years before the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration's expiry; Beijing declaring the treaty a "historical document with no practical significance"
Vietnam (1979): 200,000–300,000 troops launched a conventional cross-border invasion, capturing and destroying multiple northern cities before withdrawing
India (1962 and 2020): Initiated the 1962 Sino-Indian War; 2020 Galwan Valley clash killed 20 Indian soldiers; ongoing territorial pressure across the Line of Actual Control
Korea (1950–1953): Three million Chinese troops deployed offensively into South Korea; 180,000–400,000 Chinese deaths in a war prosecuted well beyond any defensive buffer logic
Taiwan: Repeated military exercises simulating blockade and invasion of a democratic self-governing island the PRC has never administered; explicit threats to use force to achieve unification
Economic coercion: Systematic trade punishment of Australia (wine, barley, coal, beef) after Canberra called for a COVID-origins inquiry; retaliation against South Korea over THAAD deployment; boycott pressure on Lithuania after it hosted a Taiwanese representative office
Overseas police stations and diaspora coercion: Documented operations in at least 53 countries pressuring Chinese nationals and dissidents abroad — an extraterritorial claim over persons that no genuinely non-expansionist power exercises
From an alternative vantage, ongoing Chinese behavior directly contradicts the peaceful coexistence meme:
Beijing's treatment of the overseas diaspora (huaqiao) belies a China that whose sovereign claims extend over ethnic Chinese persons, not merely territory. This extends to diaspora communities across Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Singapore, the Anglosphere, and beyond as a constituency that owes loyalty to Beijing pressuring Chinese-language media, monitors diaspora students through WeChat and informant networks, and operates overseas police stations in over fifty countries. No genuinely non-expansionist power claims jurisdiction over citizens of foreign states on the basis of ethnic heritage.
China's antagonistic relationship with the international legal and commercial order shows that it accepts its benefits while rejecting its constraints. It rejects international rulings and harasses its neighbors. In recent years China has built the world's largest navy, the largest standing army, and continues expanding nuclear arsenal.
With respect to China’s rapidly growing military capability, China faces no neighbor capable of threatening its territorial core. It has border disputes with India but India lacks the economic heft and the two nations are separated by the Himalayas. No country has the capability or stated intention to attack Chinese territory. China’s buildup is offensive in nature. The rhetoric toward Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines is not the language of a country managing security threats. It is the bellicose language of intimidation. It is also dangerously counterproductive as referenced by the recent election results in Japan.